John Miles says: > I think we're seeing the technology shift to a different level of > abstraction
Yes - this is certainly true of software, for instance. Our team attended JavaOne this year - along with 15,000 rabid (and much younger) technophiles. Object oriented programming replaces procedural programming replaces assembler coding replaces machine code - in significantly under one career length. As an undergraduate, I programmed a 6502 "KIM" to do productive work (plot time series photometry via an A/D connected to a photomultiplier) in machine code via its hex pad. Now you can generate OO code direct from UML (or so they claim - have yet to see it demonstrated practically). (Algorithms remain algorithms, however.) And no - physics remains physics. We're still building telescopes out of big shiny mirrors using optical principles well known to Fresnel and Fraunhofer. I'm reading the history of the first Atlantic telegraph cable. Great story full of details like Kelvin's invention of the precision galvanometer - virtually identical to the torsion devices whose mirrors I learned to read as an undergraduate. It may well be that TI or HP or Fluke will sell you a totally digital handheld gizmo with greater sensitivity (and "features"), but you still have to know as much about electrical circuits to use the new gizmos as you did the old gizmos. Meanwhile, it is apparently the case that today's cable laying ships still use cable handling techniques perfected during the travails of the first transatlantic cable venture 150 years ago. Some things change. Some things stay the same. What fundamentally remains the same is the reality underlying all our technology. Won't belabor the question of layering UTC on Earth orientation via mean solar time. Focus instead on the "works" of atomic clocks (or related gizmos like masers or whatever comes next). The levels of abstraction may be compressed to hide the details of intervening layers of complexity, but the two parts that will always remain are the user interface (itself an interesting reflection of human factors), and at the other end, the basic physics of whatever phenomena. I suspect I'm not alone on this list in volunteering as a local science fair judge. I focus on the middle school physical science projects as providing the most opportunity for encouraging a future career choice. Ignore the scoring rubric. The general award rules provide for first/second/third prizes with ties for second and third place, so the goal is simply to identify and rank the top five projects. It can be difficult (to put it mildly) to infer the mental state of most of the participants, but there are always a few that stand out (even after discounting the projects resulting from Science Olympiad, etc). Really, all that matters at that age is a sense of creativity. Actually, I weight any evidence of true curiosity and, well, fun even higher. These are rare (especially under the crushing weight of "standards"), but every year reveals new kids finding new ways of looking at familiar territory. I invariably leave more optimistic than when I arrived. Bottom line is that a scientific world view is likely no more prevalent now than it was in the middle ages. But it is likely no less prevalent, either. This is the world of Burning Man, the "Long Now", and public key cryptography. My neighbor is an AF pilot whose son is rebuilding a Corvette from the ground up. These are not folks full of technological angst. We just happen to be in the natural pause between the first Moon landings and our inevitable (albeit politicized) return. We'll miss this time of relative quiet when it's gone. Suggesting that the love of technological pursuits is dying out is kind of like those 19th century ruminations that all of scientific knowledge was well in hand, or that guy who figured out several decades ago that all possible songs had already been written. Not too worried at this end. Rob Seaman National Optical Astronomy Observatory _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list time-nuts@febo.com https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts